The Eurocrats had the ball and were running for a touchdown, when the Fighting Irish tackled them from behind and took the ball from them in a fumble.

Game over.

But the Eurocrats have called a foul and insist they won anyway, and the League will either make the Irish play the game over again, or will sideline them for the season until they learn their lesson.

And that, my friends, is the difference between football (or democracy) and what is happening in Europe.

One of the basic ideas behind democracy is that if you clearly present the pros and cons to an average person, that the majority will make the right decision more often than an educated or rich elite.

Of course it doesn’t work that way: What usually happens is that the press and other media is run by the elites, so the danger is manipulation of public opinion.

Yet with modern forms of communications, it is hard to silence all voices, and despite a propaganda deluge in all the Irish media, the Irish people said “no” to the Lisbon treaty that would make it a tiny, powerless minion under the European Union dominated by French and German bureaucrats.

The European Union isÂ supposed to allow economic cooperation, but if you look around the edges, they have courts that are literally changing local money (and banking), local laws and customs. One especially absurd example of this is a recent bureaucratic edict against bagpipes: because they are too loud and can harm ears.

Allowing power to bureaucrats several hundred miles away is not necessarily a good thing, and one wonders why Europe can’t allow the concept of “subsidarity” (or what is called in the US, “states’ rights”) to continue. And apparantly a lot of ordinary folks in Europe have similar questions.

The “Maastrict lite” was rewritten as the Lisbon treaty. In American football, we would say the elites decided to do a “hail Mary pass” around the public, who tended to be leery about giving up national sovereignty, by allowing eachÂ country’s Parliaments, not the public, to ratify the treaty.

Ireland’s constitution however mandated a public vote, and today, the Irish public turned down the treaty.

European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso said all indications were that Ireland had indeed rejected the treaty.

He called for other states to continue their ratification processes and said a solution should be sought.

One solution is to merely have all the other countries parliements vote on the treaty, and leave Ireland out of the Union.

Another is to send the treaty back for another vote, until they learn to vote correctly. One doubts that many of the public have read the (one pound 263 page) treaty, so why ask them to vote on it?

But in practical matters, this means that the UK, where people are also leery about losing their sovereignty and laws to (essentially) French and German bureaucrats, may be up for a fight to allow a public vote on the treaty.

And other leaders admit that other countries’ voters might turn down the treaty if given a chance:

So what you have is, in contrast to the rough and tumble public discussions in the American Presidential campaign, we have a constitution that is being imposed “from above”, where little public input is allowed.

A lot of the opposition to Bush and Bush’s wars is because of this European Union elite has their own ideas on how to run the world, and wants to destroy America’s power, via the (mainly state sponsored) press, and via their surrogates in the US.

So would a President Obama be more amenable to bow to the Europeans in matters of foreign policy, implying it is necessary to “work with our allies”? Europeans suspect he will bow to their opinions rather than be “decisive” like Bush, who asks for their opinions but won’t necessarily follow them.

1 user commented in " The Fighting Irish one, Eurocrats zero "

Nancy, very insightful piece on this issue. What a complicated mess. Of course, anything to do with government, whether U.S. or E.U. or any other country, is always a mess.

Also, congrats on being the BNN writer of the month. Obviously, an honor well deserved.

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